Anti-Sherlock

The usual method of deduction we see in the mysteries proceeds from a given state of affairs, from which the detective deduces the actions that have resulted in that state. The carpet reveals a circle crushed into the material, from which he deduces a man standing there, moving his foot in a circular motion. He’s got a dead guy to explain, after all, and people to question about what they were doing at the time. Unless it’s a show like Pushing Daisies, where they usually start by questioning the dead guy.

A story, like a computer programs, can be represented as a series of transitions from one state to another. The detective looks at the state and deduces the previous transition (or series of states and transitions). This is not the only way to use this series, though. One can also look at the transitions (the actions of the characters), and deduce the states that caused them. Which is sort of what I do as a Production Support specialist. I look at the behavior of the program and deduce the initial state that created it.

This works because computers are logic boxes, with nicely determined behaviors. Well, the behaviors that the programmer thought about were nicely determined. It’s usually in the incomplete specification of the behavior, the intersection of behaviors, the addition of new code, or the creation of new inputs, that we find our problems. Or the failure of any of these when they’re expected to occur. I like to read the code backwards to see where the tangle (the unanticipated state) could occur.

Characters are less straightforward than that, but still I prefer to treat my characters as rational beings possessing an internal logic which drives their actions. For the most part. Pure Vulcans are dull people. Completely random actors technically aren’t actors at all. I’m not nearly as interested in the werewolf as I am in the guy who becomes the werewolf. How does he deal with his curse? Once the curse strikes he’s just a ten-ton death machine, ho-hum, but before that he’s a guy scrambling to minimize (or maximize, if he’s not a nice person) the fallout, or get it lifted, or something. Far more interesting.

To me, the most creative moments in the writing of a novel are not the actions but the states. States aren’t really of interest to me, except as they provide a springboard to action. Read my stories (please) and you will find very little extraneous detail about the environment in which the characters live and move. I’m not nearly so interested in the stand of oak over there minding its own business as I am in the piece of earth on to which Joe is about to step, and even more why he’s about to step there, and where his further steps will take him. Spinning out the logic of Joe’s actions is child’s play. Inventing the world he acts in, not so much.

In A Warrior Made, I remember being stuck in the middle of the book, because I’d written myself into a place where the characters were walking down the road from one place to another. Boring, and already done by lots of other people. I was there for quite some time before I had a sudden flash of inspiration, a state that caused all my characters to go off in wildly divergent directions. The rest of the book was told as a set of intertwining adventures as each set of characters followed their own path until it all came together somehow at the end. St. Martin’s Moon took that idea a step further. Five divergent and unrelated plot threads, that intersected to resolve a situation that none of the actors even knew existed.